RBMS 2016 Blog

Poster Sessions

The RBMS 2016 poster planning subcommitee had an enthusiastic response to the call for submissions, with a total of 22 posters slated to be presented during the beverage breaks on Thursday and Friday, 10:00am – 10:45am. The posters incorporate diverse perspectives and experiences, with eleven posters on view each day. We encourage all of this year’s RBMS attendees to make their rounds and engage with the phenomenal presenters as they touch upon the larger theme of the conference: Collaboration, Outreach, and Diversity.

The posters reflect the three cornerstones of this year’s conference theme. The Rare Books Collection at the Brazilian National Library Foundation will illustrate how they are preserving their cultural heritage through collaboration with library professionals, library science, graphic design, journalism, and history students, and Brazilian and foreign professionals in a variety of sectors. The University of Southern California will demonstrate The Library Machine, which transforms Special Collections items into three-dimensional, virtual environments so users can engage and interact with their artifacts. The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library will describe their ongoing collaboration with owning institutions to preserve the contents of endangered manuscripts through digitization, such as their partnership with a nongovernmental organization in Mali to digitize over 200,000 historic documents and manuscripts smuggled out of Timbuktu in 2013 to prevent their destruction by radical Islamists. DC Africana, based at George Washington University Libraries and funded by The Council on Library and Information Resources, will elaborate on their partnership with public libraries and archives, historical societies, museums, and other academic libraries to enhance access to each institution’s holdings of local African-American materials and Africana. The Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries project, Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis (also funded by CLIR), headed by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Lehigh University, and the Free Library of Philadelphia, will demonstrate the digitization and online presentation of virtually all of the region’s medieval manuscripts and their progress towards creating the country’s largest regional collection of digitized medieval manuscripts. These posters will be joined by many more presentations that deal with outreach in the form of student curated exhibits, collaboration via the incorporation of rare books and archival collections into classes, and diverse approaches to leveraging social media to connect departments and diverse student populations to special collection materials.

We invite you to incorporate the poster sessions into your busy itineraries at this year’s RBMS conference. For a more detailed description of each poster and a display schedule, please visit the RBMS Thursday and Friday programs.